Working Families Party progressives, liberated from Cuomo and conventional politics

By Sarah Jaffe

|NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

Apr 16, 2018 | 4:17 PM

Endorsed (Glenn Blain/New York Daily News)

Andrew Cuomo doesn't make promises.

Well, he does, but no one expects him to keep them. What Andrew Cuomo makes are threats. And his threats are usually taken seriously.

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But there are signs that the governor's ability to bully his opponents into line — particularly those who challenge him from the left — is waning. Chief among them, the gleeful spirit at the Working Families Party's state committee meeting this past Saturday.

Four years ago, I covered the battle within the party between activists tired of the governor's triangulation on progressive issues like wages, foreclosure fraud, and school funding, and the unions and community groups that preferred to be at the table with the governor rather than on his hit list.

That fear won the day in 2014, although it still caused a rift with some unions — one that remains, evident in the statement from the United Federation of Teachers' Michael Mulgrew last Friday. Mulgrew said, in part, "When asked to behave responsibly, they (the WFP) react like children throwing a tantrum in the classroom."

Behaving responsibly, presumably, means falling into line and endorsing the governor who immediately walked back many of the promises he made, who after threatening to ban the fusion voting that allowed the WFP to gain its foothold in the first place then started his own fusion party, the "Women's Equality Party," which seems to have dissipated in the intervening years.

But other things have happened in those intervening years as well. The left has gone from a nascent movement, flexing its muscle with street protests and one-day strikes, to a political force that propelled socialist Bernie Sanders to contender status. The WFP itself has a reach well outside of New York State now — its support for ironworker Randy Bryce in Wisconsin may have nudged Paul Ryan into early retirement, and that's just one example.

With those shifts — particularly, with the S-word no longer unspeakable in U.S. politics — has come a change in how community organizations and some unions do politics. For decades, short-term transactional politics was the norm, a focus on wrangling gains for members at the bargaining table or the endorsement podium — where the endorsee was nearly always the incumbent or the best-funded Democrat in the room.

Community groups in particular have been dependent on union and even government funding, leaving them unwilling to break with their sources of support. And Cuomo took aim at that funding, with reported threats to unions that gave money to organizations Make the Road and New York Communities for Change, which endorsed Cynthia Nixon and Jumaane Williams.

But when Cuomo's surrogates spoke this time — not many of them, as the representatives of SEIU 32BJ and the Communications Workers of America were not even in the room — they were quickly contradicted by organizers who reminded them that Cuomo had to be dragged kicking and screaming to endorse a $15 minimum wage, one that doesn't extend to much of the state. The governor is taking credit for this victory and others, like the fracking ban, won by social movements and community organizations and the very unions that in arguing to endorse him had to admit that he usually had to be strong-armed to the table.

Those groups are moving away from deal-cutting. They are embracing the fact that their power is in the streets, in the neighborhoods where the subway barely works and the rent is too damn high. They are looking to build power for the long-term transformations that are needed, because in Donald Trump's America nothing less will suffice.

Labor unions have been a tougher ship to turn, though the endorsement of Sanders by CWA and National Nurses United indicates a shift there, too, toward endorsing candidates not simply because they are the likeliest to win, but because they will be the most forceful advocates for the things working-class people need.

What I saw on Saturday at the WFP state committee meeting were organizers who have had enough of the governor's threats. Committee members spoke of getting "rolled" by Cuomo in years past, and there was joy in the "hell yes!" and "f--k yes!" voice votes to endorse Nixon.

Nixon and Williams were noncommittal as to whether they would seek the WFP's ballot line if they did not win the Democratic primary. The fear of being a spoiler still exists, but for once, fear was not the dominant feeling in a room discussing Andrew Cuomo.

Jaffe is a reporting fellow at The Nation Institute and the author of "Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt."